Tag: design

By now, most people working in tech know and feel the deep concerns related to surveillance capitalism fostered and upheld by the tech giants. We understand that the root of the problem lies within the business model of capitalising and monetising user data. Stories of how people are being exploited surface on a daily basis, like the recent story about how Instagram withholds like notifications to certain users, with the purpose of increasing the rate of which they open the app. In the same story, The Globe and Mail describe how former high level employees of Facebook are growing a conscience and tell horrifying stories about how features are meticulously being built to exploit human behavior and make us addicts of social media.

As designers and developers we have an obligation to build experiences that are better than that. This article explains how unethical design happens, and how to do ethical design through a set of best practices. It also helps you understand how you can plant the seed to change the meaning within the company you work for and in the design community, even if you are not part of the management layer. Change starts with a movement!

Ethical Design

Let’s start with the core terminology: According to Merriam Webster, ethics is “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.” For the purpose of this article, ethics will be defined as a system of moral principles that defines what is perceived as good and evil. Ethical design is, therefore, design made with the intent to do good, and unethical design is its black hat counterpart.

Is your pattern library up to date today? Alla Kholmatova has just finished a fully fledged book on Design Systems and how to get them right. With common traps, gotchas and the lessons she learned. Hardcover, eBook. Just sayin’.

Ind.ie is a social enterprise striving for justice in the digital age. It is founded by Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag who defined an “Ethical Hierarchy of Needs” that describe the core of ethical design very well.

The ‘Ethical Hierarchy of Needs’ (licensed under CC BY 4.0) (Source: ind.ie)

As with any pyramid-shaped structure, the layers in the Ethical Hierarchy of Needs rest on the layer below it. If any layer is broken, the layers resting on top of it will collapse. If a design does not support human rights, it is unethical. If it supports human rights but does not respect human effort by being functional, convenient and reliable (and usable!), then it is unethical. If it respects human effort but does not respect human experience by making a better life for the people using it, then it is still unethical.

From a practical viewpoint, this means that products and services which exploit user data, use dark patterns and generally are only out to make money, disregarding its human purpose, are unethical. Let’s look at how unethical design manifests itself in business models and design decisions.

Unethical Design: The Black Hat Of The Business

Surveillance Capitalism

Data-driven design can be used to do good. But more often than not it is used with monetary intent also known as surveillance capitalism.

“When a company like Facebook improves the experience of its products, it’s like the massages we give to Kobe beef: they’re not for the benefit of the cow but to make the cow a better product. In this analogy, you are the cow.”

Surveillance capitalism is unethical by nature because at its core, it takes advantage of rich data to profile people and understand their behavior with the sole purpose of making money. The most chilling thought of all is how data is being used not just to predict and manipulate current behavior, but how it is used to profile our future selves through machine learning, ultimately giving companies the power to impact our future decisions and behavioral patterns.

As Cracked Labs, independent research institute and creative laboratory, states in their report about Data Against People:

“Systems that make decisions about people based on their data produce substantial adverse effects that can massively limit their choices, opportunities, and life-chances”.

This happens on a daily basis to everyone who use Facebook, where the individualized feed is carefully filtered to show the posts most likely to trigger engagement and activity. Pricing is also becoming increasingly individualized because companies are able to use rich data to assess the long-term value of customers, also known as data-driven persuasion.

Data trade and data tracking is big business. According to the report “Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life”, Oracle provides access to 5 billion (yes, billion!) unique user ID’s (this is confirmed on Oracle’s website). The word “scared” does not cover the emotional state which we should all be in over that fact.

One can only imagine how companies will be able to utilize data to profile which of us are more likely to develop mental health or physical issues, thus putting us in the “no thanks” pile of applications for our future jobs. With this in mind, I fear for the future of my children.

To some the above sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but it is not far-fetched at all. Unethical companies are exposed daily, from the VPN app who claimed to protect the data of their 24 million users, but sold it to Facebook to the software called Alphonso which, according to an article in The New York Times, is used in more than 250 game apps (some of which are designed for children) to monitor what tv ads people watch, even if the app is not in active use. The list of companies who harvest and use data with deeply unethical purposes goes on and on and on.

Black Hat Design

Nevertheless, data tracking is not the only way that unethical design plays out. Dark patterns fall under unethical design too, as they are black hat design patterns specifically designed to trick us into doing something we don’t necessarily want to do. It may not be considered unethical when a company makes use of the dark pattern called Roach Motel to make it nearly impossible to delete your account (looking at you, Skype). But looking at the motivation of the business side, it is not hard to see the unethical nature of the design, naming the Chinese shoe company who tricked people to swipe by adding a fake strand of hair on their Instagram ad as just one example.

Harry Brignull, one of the originators and driving forces behind Dark Patterns, states that dark patterns work because they take advantage of the human brain’s weaknesses and the way we are hard-wired. That counts as unethical in my book, and we have a moral obligation to the people who design these products to do better.

Businesses who nurture consumerism and manipulate people into buying more stuff are unethical by design. It is common practice in e-commerce, and it takes advantage of a phenomenon called “loss aversion”. Hotels.com is particularly aggressive, sending several notifications within seconds about how many people have booked and are looking at the same room as you.

Hotels.com loves letting us know just how many others are looking at a room to ‘motivate’ us into booking fast.

The requirement of any organization that collects data to do so in a secure manner by design;

Heavy fines for data breaches;

Data must only be collected after explicit consent, and the language used to explain why the data is collected must be plain and simple. In addition, consent must be withdrawable at any time and must be as easy to do as it was giving it (which, by the way, includes Sign up → Delete profile);

“The right to be forgotten,” meaning that people have the right to have their data deleted;

The right for people to get access to their personal data in any organization, alongside information about how this data is processed;

Data portability, meaning that people have the right to get hold of their data in one company and transfer it to another company;

Heavy fines for non-compliance of GDPR.

All in all, May 25, 2018, is a pretty good day for the people, and a sign of a much different future for all the unethically designed organizations out there.

But let’s not kid ourselves and think that change will happen overnight or across all organizations in a heartbeat. A deeper change is needed in order to make that happen over time.

Change Happens Through Change Of Meaning

GDPR is not likely to solve all of our problems. Believing that would be naive. That’s why it will continue to be up to the people within company walls to make a difference. The good news is that making a change is possible even if you’re not part of the management team who decides on the business model.

This type of change towards a more ethical design approach is not claimed to happen overnight. Rather, it is possible to make changes incrementally and foster long-term, organizational change through what Don Norman and Roberto Verganti call Meaning-driven Innovation (read more in their article about “Incremental and Radical Innovation”).

Meaning-driven innovation is a result of people starting to articulate new thoughts that create new dynamics, which ultimately lead to radically new meanings.

Don Norman and Roberto Verganti say that radical innovation only happens when one of the following things occur:

A new enabling technology is available in a reliable, economical form (it took 20 years for touch interfaces to exit the labs and enter the phone and tablet market);

When the meaning of something changes in society — also referred to as meaning-driven innovation.

I think that the increasing awareness, focus, and concern about our privacy in respect to data-driven businesses will in a not so distinct future spark radical innovation and change in society. Ironically, the companies who founded surveillance capitalism have also sparked a change in how we perceive our right to privacy, and we are already starting to see companies and organizations innovate and foster privacy driven solutions.

The meaning of companies who track and surveil us is already changing. We used to not think very hard about, and maybe even find it convenient when ads served on Facebook were based on our browsing history. But with the escalation of surveillance capitalism, I will argue that we are going through a meaning change as an increasing mass of people are finding it not only uncomfortable but directly unacceptable to be spied on in the name of a business.

DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track, had an average of 16 million search queries per day in 2017, a sign that privacy is an increasing concern among people when using the web. Also, we are seeing apps devoted to privacy reaching markets, such as Signal, a secure phone and messenger app designed to protect privacy. Furthermore, it is highly likely that GDPR will spark further meaning change related to privacy.

Transition To A Human-Centered Design Approach

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a philosophy developed by Don Norman (among others). According to the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), HCD is defined by “the active involvement of users and a clear understanding of user and task requirements”.

Don Norman and Roberto Verganti conclude in their substantial study that HCD is only suitable for incremental innovation — step by step improvements — because new ideas are not discovered while constantly looking at the existing state of things as it is done through user research.

While this sounds reasonable, I believe that HCD can prove to be the offset to meaning-driven innovation, ultimately leading to a broad meaning change about what people will accept and won’t accept from unethical organizations. The reason why I believe this, is that HCD fosters a deeper sense of empathy than any other experience design method.

Human-Centered Design is a framework as well as a mindset. At its core, working “human-centered” means involving the people you serve early and continuously in the process, i.e. using research to establish the needs of these people, understanding what problems they have, and how your product can help solve these problems.

It falls within the natural sphere of experience designers to work human-centered, but what do you do if your job is in design and development, and you are constantly occupied by sprint reviews and daily tasks?

While working with a remote development team, I learned that the developers didn’t have any contact with the people who used the product. This often led to heated discussions where statements like “I think…”, “From a technical perspective…”, and “I feel…” were the main arguments.

The biggest problem with basing decisions on what you think and feel, or what is easiest from a technical perspective, is that it doesn’t involve the people you are serving. The people who your product or service is put in the world to solve problems for. That’s where HCD comes in.

UX designers and researchers typically conduct research, document the insights and bring them forward in a refined state to the design- and product team in the shape of personas, user needs descriptions, user flows, journeys, and so on. And that’s all well and good. The problem is, however, that the distance between the organisation and people you serve remains large, because no one except the UX designers talked to them or have seen them use the product. So they keep going back to “I feel…”, “I think…” and “From a technical perspective…”

To help establish empathy towards the people you serve, there are a couple of very impactful things designers and developers — and the rest of the organization — can do (and can ask for from the UX team).

Involve all team members in watching videos from user testing sessions.Actually going through the pains and delights of the people who use your products (or prototypes, depending on what you’re testing) is worth every second. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to watch other people interact with and comment on the stuff you’re building (and no, your team doesn’t count as “people” here!).

If this is not part of the routine in your company, ask for it to be included. Certainly, the vast majority of UX designers who would not be thrilled to organize and facilitate such sessions. You are guaranteed to go through pain, agony, frustration, happiness and get multiple eye openers, and it will all serve as the stepping stone towards growing a human-centered mindset.

Ask for actual, living portraits of the people you serve.This includes photos and video from contextual studies (link), stories from their daily life and stories about them. Getting a deeper sense of the people on the other side of the product you develop creates instant empathy and makes it a lot harder to design things that knowingly are bad for them.

Insist on continuous testing.It cannot be emphasized enough how crucial testing is in HCD. This includes early proof of concept tests, prototype tests, and usability tests. A side bonus of early and continuous involvement from the people who are meant to use the product is that it saves money in the long run. The earlier you realize a bad call or error, the cheaper it is to fix.

A lot has been said about the nuclear alarm that was triggered by mistake in Hawaii on January 13. However, it’s pretty safe to say that early and continuous testing would have helped prevent it.

A poorly designed screen has been named the cause of a false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii. (Source: Honolulu Civil Beat)

Always ask “why?”To start a change of meaning in an organization or community, the first important step is to start asking “why.” Ask why something is being done unethically; ask why you are told to make a black hat feature; question the current state of things.

Ask on what grounds design decisions are being made. If it’s because of what the CEO or someone else thinks, and it has no root in insights from the people you are serving, ask for that validation. Meaning change grows through small steps.

Ethical Design Best Practices

Alongside establishing a human-centered design tradition in the organization, it is also important to make use of the best practices of ethical design. People who do so are part of taking the lead and showing the rest of the organization how things can be done in a more ethical way, all of which will add to the incremental meaning change. Just as dark patterns fall under unethical design, we have White Hat design patterns that can be utilized to ensure ethical design, some of which you can learn about in the following.

Use Data To Improve The Human Experience

Despite numerous companies using data for unethical purposes, such as increasing consumption and traffic, data can, in fact, be used to actually improve the human experience.

This is the case on the ind.ie forum where setting up an account is suggested as a way to customize your experience by remembering what you’ve read.

ind.ie‘s forum highlights the benefits of setting up an account — one that won’t harvest your data and use it unethically.

In a current project in which I am involved in making an app for students to more easily access their Learning Management System, we are sorting the student’s individual courses by “last visited”; we know through research that the students most often revisit a small number of pages that relate to the courses they are currently enrolled in. This customization is not designed to change behavior or nudge them into using parts of the app they didn’t intend to. Instead, it is designed to make their experience faster and more efficient.

In this early wireframe from a current project, it it shown how we used knowledge about current usage of the product to increase efficiency in the app by sorting the student’s courses by ‘last visited’.

Another positive example is the American pharmacy Walgreens, who sends out reminders when it’s time to refill on things like vitamins. This is an extremely helpful feature that solves a problem a lot of us have.

Data can help inform research initiatives to understand how you’re not tackling the problems people have when interacting with your product.

Skyscanner, a travel search engine, noticed through their data that their newly launched design didn’t go down well for the people who used their service to fly out of Amsterdam. That data helped inform a research initiative that ultimately lead to a customized solution for people flying to and from Amsterdam that broke down the barriers the new design had initially built (here’s the background story).

Advertising Without Tracking

Advertising is not necessarily unethical. Advertising based on granular data is. It is careless (if not stupid) to rely on a single platform for the majority of a brand’s marketing efforts, especially considering that said platform owns and controls the data the brand uses as the foundation for its ad targeting.

Facebook, Instagram, and Google care just about as little about their advertisers as they do about the people who they see as “users,” i.e. they can make any change they want to, disregarding any consequences it might have for people or businesses using their platform. For example, there was a time when they started blocking fake accounts en masse, which hurt numerous companies whose social media admins had set up fake accounts to administer business pages because they (understandably) didn’t want to use their private accounts for this purpose. This is standard procedure from Facebook who only allows one profile per person (likely because allowing several would contaminate their data tracking).

The platform is always the weakest link in a marketing strategy because it is a third party beyond the control of companies. Thinking back to the 90’s when I worked in marketing at a regional newspaper, granular data tracking was not an option. When a store had placed an ad in the paper about an event, they would simply monitor how many people showed up, and compare that to their expectations to determine the success rate.

While “the good old days” were certainly not good in all aspects, the thought of not basing advertising on granular user data tracking is an appealing thought. John Gruber’s blog, Daring Fireball is an example of a site that doesn’t allow ad tracking. Instead, John Gruber encourages advertisers to add a custom link to their ads enabling them to monitor the click rate on their end.

As John Gruber rightfully states:

“If you pay (say) Facebook for an ad, why in the world would you, the advertiser, trust Facebook’s numbers for how the ad performed?”

Another great example worth highlighting is Goodwings, a hotel booking site that donates half of their commission to charity. They can do so because of a close collaboration with a large number of NGO’s which means they spend very little on traditional marketing.

Goodwings is a hotel search engine that donates half of their commission to charity.

And if you think Google Analytics is your only option for collecting meaningful data, think again: Matamo is an open source tool that is installed directly on your own server. It guarantees that data is not shared with advertising agencies such as Google.

Always, Always Prioritize Usability

Surveillance capitalism and data tracking are heavily talked about problems related to ethical design these days. But we must not forget the importance of complying with the best practices of usability. Without it, design is unethical, as a lack of usability almost always entails the use of dark patterns. A good place to go to read more about core usability is Nielsen Norman Group.

Back in the early days, Jakob Nielsen defined 5 core components of usability:

Learnability,

Efficiency,

Memorability

Errors, and

Satisfaction.

To ensure a usable product, it’s crucial that these five components are front and center in the design and development process.

While it may not be the most interesting 404 page around, Apple’s version focuses on error prevention by offering us a forward path when we hit a lost page.

Don’t Ask For More Than You Need

As with many other aspects in life, asking for more than you need results in exploitation. It’s common for e-commerce sites to ask for tons of information when people sign up for an account or buy a product. But if someone is buying a digital product (such as a book), there really is no need to ask for anything other than their email address.

Signal is a great example. Private at its core, it doesn’t ask for anything more than the information that is absolutely necessary for people to start using the app right away.

Be Transparent

Norwegian.com has perhaps one of the best airfare booking systems in the world. Not only is it convenient to use but they also offer full transparency in relation to their optional service fees, something that is often hidden away. Anyone who lives outside of an Amazon storage country knows how hard it is to find the actual delivery price of their location.

Conclusion

The movement towards a more ethical future has begun. Change doesn’t happen radically short term unless it’s built into the core of the business model. But that doesn’t mean we cannot change the current state for the better. We can do so through incremental change; one step at a time. By working human-centered, by asking why, and by using best practices for ethical design. That’s our obligation as the ones who build products so deeply ingrained in people’s lives. What we do changes and shapes lives for better or for worse. I choose better.

Learn More

There are a lot of valuable resources available for anyone interested in ethical design. Here are a few to get you started:

Cracked Labs is an independent research institute and a creative laboratory based in Vienna, Austria. It investigates the socio-cultural impacts of information technology and develops social innovations in the field of digital culture. They offer in-depth reports about most things related to privacy.

Service Worker is probably one of the most misrepresented technologies we currently have. When I hear people talking about it, the topic almost always revolves around serving an app when a user is offline. However, Service Worker can do so much more than that, and every week I come across new articles that show how powerful the technology really is.

This month, for example, we can learn how to use Service Worker for cross-tab messaging and to load off requests into the background with the Background Sync API. I think the toolset we now have in our browsers already allows us to build great experiences regardless of the network state. Now it’s up to us to make the experiences so great that users truly love them. And that’s probably the hardest part.

Getting the process just right ain’t an easy task. That’s why we’ve set up ‘this-is-how-I-work’-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works really well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

General

Ed Ellson examined Chrome’s Background Sync API and the retry strategy it uses to perform a request. By allowing synchronization in the background after a first attempt has failed, the API helps us improve the browsing experience for users who go offline or are on unstable connections.

Security

With GraphQL you can query exactly what you want whenever you want. This is amazing for working with an API but also has complex security implications. Instead of asking for legitimate, useful data, a malicious actor could submit an expensive, nested query to overload your server, database, network, or all of these. To prevent this from happening, Max Stoiber shows us how we can secure the GraphQL API in our projects.

Privacy

WebKit is introducing the Storage Access API. The new API targets one of the major issues with Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP): Identifying users who are logged in to a first-party service but view content of it embedded on a third party (YouTube videos on a blog, for example). The Storage Access API allows third-party embeds to request access to their first-party cookies when the user interacts with them. A good solution to protect user privacy by default and allow exceptions on request.

A year after Facebook’s announcement to broadly use Cache-Control: Immutable, Paul Calvano examined how widespread its usage is on the web — apart from the few big players. Interesting research and it’s still sad to see that this useful performance tool is used so little. At Colloq, we use it quite a lot, which saves us a lot of traffic and load on our servers and enables us to serve a lot of pages nearly instantly to recurring users.

JavaScript

Jad Joubran shares how to run fetch in a Web Worker to offload it from the main thread into its own. This could be a useful experiment for tasks where expensive requests are triggered, and maybe even at regular intervals.

CSS

Jens Oliver Meiert’s new article “We write CSS like we did in the 90s, and yes, it’s silly” is a thought-provoking piece that shows that despite more tooling and conventions, we fail to improve how we write CSS. This is not about writing CSS in Javascript or a class naming convention but more about how our tools work and how we try to optimize things while keeping the bigger picture intact.

Preethi Sam shares various tricks on how to create knockout text effects with pure CSS. Interesting to see how many different techniques we have nowadays to create such effects.

Accessibility

Heydon Pickering wrote about building inclusive notifications, not only from a technical perspective but the user experience point of view. This resource gives useful advice for designing notifications, what content to include, and how and when to present them to users.

Work & Life

This week I read an article by Alex Duloz, and his words still stick with me: “When we develop a new application, when we post content on the Internet, whatever we do that people will have access to, we should consider just for a minute if our contribution adds up to the level of dumbness kids/teenagers are exposed to. If it does, we should refrain from going live.” The truth is, most of us, including me, don’t consider this before posting on the Internet. We create funny things, share funny pictures and try to get fame with silly posts. But in reality, we shape society with this. Let’s try to provide more useful resources and make the consumption of this more enjoyable so young people can profit from our knowledge and not only view things we think are funny. “We should always consider how teenagers will use what we release.”

There’s an important article on how unhappiness has grown in America’s population since around the year 2000. It reveals that while income inequality might play a role, the more important aspect is that young people who use a lot of digital media are unhappier than those who use it only up to an hour a day. Interestingly, people who don’t use digital media at all, are unhappy, too, so the outcome of this could be that we should try to use digital media only moderately — at least in our private lives. I bet it’ll make a big difference.

As technologies change and design techniques evolve, it’s inevitable that we’d experience massive growth in terms of design quality. There are similar parallels we can see within video game design as well. For instance:

This was CERN, the very first website back in 1991. Just some basic HTML and ample white space:

This example from Smashing Magazine is how we design websites and share information online in 2018:

A much more complicated and yet beautiful web design… 27 years after the advent of websites. (Large preview)

Nope, we can’t do any magic tricks, but we have articles, books and webinars featuring techniques we all can use to improve our work. Smashing Members get a seasoned selection of magic front-end tricks — e.g. live designing sessions and perf audits, too. Just sayin’! 😉

Now, if you look at the history of video game design, you’ll note a similar track; one in which early games like Pong were incredibly simplistic and devoid of any real story:

But now there are games like Grand Theft Auto that put players in the actual driver’s seat, allowing them to control the pace, direction, and outcomes of their experience:

As technologies improve and design techniques evolve, improvements in digital design are inevitable. What is truly impressive, however, is how we are now able to use design to tell a story. In other words, we no longer need to use long scrolls to set up plots or describe what a company does. This is especially great when designing for the mobile experience, which already sets pretty strict limits on how much we can “tell” versus “show.”

In this article, I want to look at three ways in which video game designers get the storytelling aspect of design right, and how web designers can use these techniques to provide users with an immersive experience and drive them more quickly and effectively to conversion.

Three Video Game Storytelling Techniques We Need More Of In Web Design

Video games have come a long way since they were introduced in the late ‘70s in terms of graphics, user controls and, of course, story development. With video game design evolving around the same time as web design, there are similar features and trends that can be found between the two. The only thing is, I don’t know if many web designers think to look to video games for design tips.

Granted, the overwhelming use of shocking colors and cheesy dialogue won’t work that well when you’re developing a professional website. However, it’s the way in which video game designers tell a story with design elements — and effectively guide players to the end by using those elements — that we need to pay attention to.

As your visitors’ attention spans shorten and demand grows for more engaging experiences, web designers can greatly benefit from using these storytelling techniques on the web and, more importantly, for mobile.

1. Make Your Visitor the Hero

Ever since the early days of video games, the goal was to put the player in the front seat and to let them be the hero of the story.

The player was always the hero (i.e., PAC-MAN), and his or her mission was to work through the situation (i.e., to fight the ghosts) and get to the end.

The same holds true for modern gaming as well, though many games go the route of giving players the impression they have control over their heroic journey. A good example of this are the Telltale games.

Basically, each of their games is crafted around a well-known story. In the example above, the game is based on the events that unfold in the T.V. show Game of Thrones. Throughout the game, players are called upon to step into the world and make active choices about what happens next. Sometimes this is through dialogue (at 6:00), and sometimes it happens through action (at 11:55).

In the end, every player of the game ends up at the same place regardless of which way they turn or what line they utter. This doesn’t make the experience any less enthralling for the player as they are actively engaged throughout, and there is a reward in the end — even if it’s one they share with every other person who has played this game.

That’s exactly what websites should do for their visitors, right? They allow visitors to take full control over the experience so that they want to get to the end. For the web, this translates to conversion. And the best way to do this, as evidenced by video games, is to give visitors the ability to pick and choose how they traverse through the story.

Here are some ways in which you can do this with web design:

Create User Personas

Develop user personas before you do anything else when strategizing and planning for a website. Your personas should have a key “problem” they face. It’s then your job to establish the user’s journey in a way that helps them discover solutions to that problem.

Enable Avatar Setup

For those of you with websites that allow for users to create profiles, this is a great opportunity to enable them to define their own unique identity. Allow them to upload a photo of themselves and to personalize their profile. You can also give them different access settings which directs what kinds of content they see, what types of offers they receive, and so on.

WordPress membership websites like WPMU DEV are a good example of websites that do this. Users can create their own profiles and earn points and special statuses based on how much work they put into the community.

A fun community where web design and development professionals can set up individual profiles. (Large preview)

Use Relatable Content

In video game design, there is something known as “ludonarrative dissonance.” Basically, it “is the unpleasant situation where we’re asking players to do something they don’t want to do… or prevent them from doing what they want.”

You’ve likely encountered this sort of resistance as you’ve designed websites in the past.

You review the analytics and discover high bounce rates on certain pages or even right from within the home page. You discover that there’s a visual element or a line of copy that just doesn’t sit right with your audience. That’s because it’s a disruption in what should be an otherwise immersive experience. By using content that resonates with the visitor, that makes them feel like you’re telling their story, they won’t feel disconnected and want to stray from the goal.

Spin a Fantasy

Let’s face it; if you’re building a website on behalf of a business or other professional entity, you don’t have some dramatic tale to spin like a video game does. And that’s fine.

Consumers aren’t visiting websites in order to get caught up in hours of epic storytelling. That said, they do still expect to be engaged by what you’re sharing with them.

So, why not depict a fantastic scenario through visual storytelling? The brain digests visual content 60% more quickly than written content, so your web designs and other visuals (like video, animation, and so on) are the keys to doing this.

The Airbnb blog always does a great job of this type of visual storytelling.

While every story is probably told through 800 to 1,000 words, it’s also accompanied by highly attractive visuals that tell you something about what you’d experience at this specific destination.

2. Minimize Distractions by Using Symbols

Let’s talk specifically about websites viewed from mobile devices for a second, shall we? As of August 2017, 52.64% of all visits to websites were done via a smartphone. And, starting in 2017, the most popular size for a smartphone was between five and six inches and will only continue to grow in popularity as the years go on.

That’s not a lot of space to fill with content for the majority of site visitors, is it? So, how do you effectively tell a story if you have limited real estate? If we’re to take a page out of the video game design handbook, then we should turn to symbols.

“[O]ne, often overlooked, strong point of game UX is the preference towards symbolism. The ability to transform meaning into symbols was a huge step towards visual decluttering.”

Functional minimalism is already something you’re doing in your own web design efforts, but have you thought about how it can tie into the storytelling aspect as well? When it comes to video games, symbols help clear the way so that players can focus on the story before them. You’ll see this most often in two-dimensional, side-scroller games:

Street Fighter and other fighting games place the health bar at the top:

There are even ones like Virtua Racing and other geographic-dependent games that put their navigation off to the side for players to reference:

As you can see, the use of symbols keeps the gamespace clear and easy to follow along with.

Whether you’re designing mostly for desktop or mobile users, your aim is to design a space that encourages users to follow along and not get caught up in distractions. So, while you might think that full-screen, overlay navigation is a creative choice for your website or the ever-present live chat pop-up will get more engagements, you may be doing yourself a great disservice.

By employing the use of easily recognized symbols throughout your site, you can keep the design clean and clear and distraction-free. The story you’re weaving throughout is the most important thing, and you don’t want to stand in the way of visitors being able to get to it.

A good example of how to minimize navigation and directional cues so visitors can focus on the main content and story. (Large preview)

The website is for their architecture design firm. Rather than write volumes of text about what they’ve done and how they do it, they allow the images to speak for themselves. They’ve then employed a number of symbols to help visitors continue on to other points of interest in their journey.

Here are some ways in which you might use symbols to declutter your site:

Hamburger icon (for the navigation)

Profile photo icon (for account details)

Pencil icon (for an editing interface)

Gear icon (for settings)

Shopping cart icon (to checkout)

Magnifying glass (to expand the search bar)

Connector icon (to open social sharing and RSS feed options)

Question mark (to expand live chat, search, or help options)

And so on.

One thing to note here is that you don’t want to overdo it with icons. As you can see from the video game examples above, the entire interface isn’t strewn with icons. They’re simply there to hold the place of elements players are already familiar with and will refer to often. That’s the way you should handle icons for your own site. Think about how easy your icons will be to decipher as well as which ones are absolutely necessary. Decluttering doesn’t mean hiding every element under an icon; you simply want to tidy up a bit.

If you’re concerned with the potential for confusion over what your icons mean to users, then use labels, alt text, or tooltips to provide further elaboration to those who need it.

3. Be Smart About How You Use Space

One of the nice things about video games is how they use actual walls and roadblocks to prevent players from navigating into territory where they shouldn’t be. One of my favorite games that does this right now is called LittleBigPlanet. While it is similar to side-scrolling adventures like Super Mario, its design expands beyond the basic two dimensions usually experienced in these kinds of games.

As you can see, the player encounters a number of hard surfaces which then prompt him or her to move back and forth between layers, to climb up various elements, and to find a more ideal route towards the end of the game.

First-person shooter games like Halo also use physical elements to keep players confined to the main gamespace and on track to completing the mission and story.

As a web designer, you don’t have the luxury of crafting walls around the user’s journey on your site. That said, you don’t have to design a website and leave it all to chance. There are ways to steer visitors through a direct path to conversion.

Kill Screen did an interesting write-up about the art of spatial storytelling in video games. In it, writer Sharang Biswas explained the idea that “Spaces can be designed. They can be made to promote certain pathways, encourage specific behaviors, even elicit emotional reactions.”

There are a number of ways in which you can do this with design:

Use a Spotlight

In video games, you can use light and darkness to draw attention to important pathways. On websites, it’s not always easy to employ the use of lightness or darkness as too-dark of a design or too-light of text could lead to a bad user experience. What you want to do instead is create a “spotlight” of sorts. You can do this by infusing a key area of your design with a dramatic color or a boldly stylized font.

In a site that’s otherwise pretty light in color usage, Kappow does a nice job using it to highlight two key areas of the site where it’s clear visitors should visit: its case studies.

It’s more than obvious where Kappow wants visitors to focus their attention as they scroll through the home page. (Large preview)

Add Clues

If you’ve ever played a horror video game before, you know how critical the element of sound can be for it. Here’s an example of how Until Dawn uses sound (as well as visual footprints) to try to steer the player in the right direction:

In all honesty, I’m not a big fan of music on websites, even if they’re from auto-play videos that I visited the website for in the first place. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way as there aren’t many websites that employ the use of background music or auto-play audio anymore.

That said, while you might not be able to direct visitors down the page with the sound of something playing down below, you can use other elements to lead them. For one, you can use interactive elements like animation to draw their attention to where it needs to go. Let’s take a game like Angry Birds, for example.

See how the little red birds are hopping up and down while they wait their turn? It’s a subtle gesture, but one that is sure to draw first-time players’ attention to the area of the screen in which they should directly interact if they want to move on to the next level. Animation on a website would work just as effectively if you’re trying to lure visitors’ eyes down to a key element like a contact form or a clickable button.

But it doesn’t just have to be animation. Other video game designers simply plant clues around the landscape to steer players through the journey. I’m not suggesting that your site start hiding Easter eggs all over the place. Instead, you may want to think about using subtle arrows or lines that define the space in which visitors should “play” and then move down through.

Employ a Mascot

For some brands, it might make sense to employ the use of an actual mascot to guide visitors through the story. If it’s an already established mascot and it won’t intrude too heavily on the experience, then why not bring it on the journey to ensure that visitors are checking in at all the right spots?

Or you can do like BarkBox and use a series of related mascots to guide visitors through different parts of the site (especially the signup and subscription process).

BarkBox uses a series of illustrated black-and-white mascots to guide visitors through the conversion processes. (Large preview)

Summary

As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.” Ideally, your web design will do more showing of that story instead of telling, which is how video game design tends to succeed in this matter.

Remember: Storytelling isn’t just relegated to big brands that can weave bright and shiny tales about how consumers’ lives were changed with their products. Nor is it just for video game designers that have hours of gameplay to develop for their audiences. A story simply needs to convey to the end-user how their problem can be fixed by your site’s solution. Through subtle design strategies inspired by video game storytelling techniques, you can effectively share and shape your own story.

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